One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.
Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.
Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.
Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
I've never understood the fetishization of long working hours. If there is a job where you can meaningfully work 80+ hours a week, the same (and often better) results can be achieved with more employees working fewer hours. If the work can't be split like that, it's probably demanding enough that you can't sustain more than 20-30 productive hours a week in the long term.
It's possible to mix reasonable hours of demanding work with additional hours of meetings, routine work, and procrastination. Maybe it's cheaper for the employer than managing the work better and hiring additional people for the routine parts. Maybe there are some social and organizational benefits to the employer when the employees have no life outside work. But long hours like that don't lead to superior outputs.
It made choices that turned out to be good in retrospect. And it's young enough that it hasn't turned into a stagnant bureaucracy yet.
Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
in 2001, Eutelsat transitioned into a private company, Eutelsat S.A., and later became Eutelsat Communications S.A., headquartered in Paris, France.
In 2023, Eutelsat merged with OneWeb, a company founded in 2012, to form the Eutelsat Group.
Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.
So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."
You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
And before 2001, Eutelsat was an intergovernmental organization. You can't get rid of legacy baggage just by rebranding yourself. You need to get rid of existing stakeholders, directors, and managers. And to discard the existing organizational structures and organizational culture.
It's not possible to keep making good decisions indefinitely. Every organization eventually regresses towards mediocrity. Maybe incentives ruin things, maybe administrators learn how to game the system, or maybe the environment changes and the way the organization operates is no longer adequate.
I don't really follow what you are arguing here. You starting with long hours is the same as hiring two times the amount of people, then you say that the european companies are all to old to innovate? There are plenty of european startups in the space race, they just can't compete... because europeans have a distain for "Fetishizing long work hours"
If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have their own goals instead of being mindless cogs in the machine. SpaceX is still young enough that it may not be showing clear signs of stagnation, but it's hard to see that from the outside. Google is a few years older and clearly suffering from conflicting interests.
>If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.
Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.
Calling building the biggest rocket in the world and the largest sat company in the world, that both launches, manufactures and operates the most sats in the world, while being the only company that can deliver humans reliably into space and also has a private space flight business. Claiming that ist 'stagnet' is an absolutely absurd claim. Oh and that was the Falcon Heavy.
Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.
Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.
And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.
SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.
I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.
Because the USA is a big economy where people speak only one language. Would Elon Musk be able to create same success if he started Starlink or SpaceX in Norway?
What about France? ArianeSpace was the SpaceX of the 80s (they had >50% market share of commercial satellite launches). There were plenty of other innovative European companies if you go back several decades. These days? Not so much..
* The dictate of fail fast and iterate quickly, along with simplification of mechanisms and ample compute power.
* Not being mired in the bureaucracy of committees and government bodies to answer to
Yes, being enabled by a billionaire with a dream made a huge difference. But that's not a guarantee, as there's been 3 such billionaires and only one SpaceX.
Or... incredibly long work hours and all of that just falls into place? Have you ever read any books about spaceX? His "surges" are what made spacex great.
Musk wasn't even close to being a billionaire when SpaceX was founded. He is a billionaire because about 10 years after SpaceX was founded Tesla and SpaceX at the same time took off.
And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.
IRIS2 is literally being shot up this year and will work with good ol' regular 5G, instead of relying on expensive specialized terminals like starlink. [0]
No need to bring anti-worker propaganda into this.
> Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
The problem is cultural yes but they have plenty of low cost labor willing to work overtime and put in long hours. It's called Eastern Europe. The bigger problem is an overly bureaucratic Brussels and a lack of imagination among their leadership. Britain can probably do well in this area, maybe the French too if they get their head out of their asses. The day they stop sending their top ML companies like Huggingface and Mistral to the US for funding is the day when the Fifth Republic finally spreads realizes their potential.
European oligarchs have different priorities. They invest in land, art and gold, that's how you preserve capital over generations. That's why top european companies end up taking money from venture capital in the US.
I hope they offer this in the US (it wouldn’t cost them any extra satellites). I’m looking for a starlink alternative. Ideally they could terminate my connection over there and I’d get gdpr protection too.
There is already a Canadian company, Telesat, that’s been doing comms since 1969.
Unfortunately, like most things from Canada, there was never enough market for it to catch on. Maybe that will change now the US has unlocked the demand.
Why? Because Elon like many people is extremely smart on narrow fields, he is not generally smart (he can’t fight for example, which is a form of intelligence. He also struggles with being honest, demonstrating potentially low EQ).
That’s not to say he’s dumb - it’s just that there is no one (!) who is generally smart - there is no generally applicable intelligence, experience always matters, and you always learn by doing.
It’s an illusion of the high IQ crowd that high IQ will means you will always succeed.
He is also always taking high risk bets. The X/politics/Trump bet paid off, in a way, but it also has its blowback.
edit also having said all this, it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.
> ...it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.
I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
I suspect there's a lot of really smart people who were previously happily living/working in the US who are now looking to emigrate to other lands, Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative. Could also rope in the Chinese to help as they also aren't too happy with the current state of affairs.
Britain tried voting themselves out from under the influence of a politician in Brussels that nobody in Britain voted for, but found that removing that influence was a lot easier said then done.
Sure I’m just saying Europe is not a place. Europe is not a giant coordinated economy. I’m “European” and I know how hard coordination problems are in the continent, since I’ve lived through its mismanagement my entire adult life.
Your head of government appointed a member of that commission, though. For better or worse, it's similar to that same head of government being appointed by the people you actually voted for in a parliamentary system (but two steps removed).
> the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
.
> Could also rope in the Chinese to help
This is pretty funny. That's just switching who you rely on.
> Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative
In Europe we prefer unskilled labour from third world countries so that they can do uber eats for cheap
He had little choice but to defect to Trump's side. If Harris had won, the damage due to supporting Trump would have been finite and likely fixable. However, a Trump victory would wreck essentially all of his companies if he'd gone all-in for Harris. They have massive dependencies on Federal government support.
No way to hand-wave the Nazi salutes away with game theory, though. Those were just stupid. Safe to say that nobody including Trump expected him to go that far.
Stay out and distance yourself from either camp? You're absolving the agency of the richest person in the world. And I get that might hard when one has got a crippling social media addiction and can't help but run their mouth. But again, let's not absolve the agency of the richest person in the world.
Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go.
That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutrality was never an option.
Few if any of us, regardless of wealth, have any real "agency" with Trump in office. There's nothing he can't fuck up and no one he can't fuck over. This is not an attempt at justification or absolution, just a simple statement of fact.
Again: you guys are missing my point. Whether you like it or not, or agree or not, they had no choice. Being rich as hell only leaves them that much more vulnerable to Trump.
If your business relies on the USPS as much as Amazon's still does, you want to have a seat at the table when the administration decides how they're going to kneecap the USPS. Same with tariffs, when half of the crap they sell comes straight outta Shenzhen. See also NASA and Musk. Being locked out of the rooms where these decisions get made is potentially fatal for them.
Your whole argument rests on excluding the middle, which could have been tepid support instead of appearing on stage to throw Nazi salutes, giving out money to voters signing fake Orwellian pledges about "supporting" the Constitution, and threatening to primary non-maggot congressional candidates. You've essentially set up a Roko's Basilisk, based around one small hateful man rather than superintelligence.
And I think I addressed the salutes (and implicitly his other actions) as being completely irrational and inexplicable. Musk does that sort of thing a lot.
If you're under the impression I think any of this is a good thing, that would be grossly incorrect.
Jeff Bezos seems to have made a few minor genuflections in Trump's direction and is otherwise unaffected (except for the wreckage Trump's tariffs are likely inflicting on Amazon.) No, Musk's decision was a choice. And now he's stuck with that choice. There is almost certainly no way that things "just go back to normal" with a future Democratic administration.
The truth is the normative push has been working very well. The EU is a very successful market. The poorer parts are getting richer far faster as soon as they join and the whole union is peaceful, something which was thought impossible sixty years ago.
The only people who would like the EU to disband are its ennemies and I include the US amongst them.
It's so funny when anyone in the US makes fun of the EU because we're literally the EU with an even stronger overbearing central government, more infighting, and you're not allowed to leave.
This exactly, one of the more bizarre brain worms around tech community is people that fetishize US and want EU to be more like that... and then complain about centralisation and standardization that makes US so strong.
I honestly would not be surprised if we ended up returning to a more fragmented EU, it's becoming quite a mess.
Personally, I absolutely love if we could have something looser, like a "Common European Area": freedom to travel, freedom to study, freedom to live, freedom to work. That's it. No EC/EP or anything like that.
This is what the orange guy dreams about as well. That he can strike individual "deals" with each small country so he can win on size like a sumo wrestler against a featherweight wrestler.
It is pretty obvious that the common foreign policy is more important than ever. Sadly it is too late to include Canada, South Korea, Australia and Japan into that umbrella, at least this time around.
And people here in Sweden are talking about that next we will need to give up our currency and use the Euro since that is what T will weaponize next, going after the smaller currencies.
This was something that came up during Brexit of course but it seems difficult when you start getting into the details.
The idea is that (completely reasonably) if you have a “single market” as you describe, you need harmonised regulation so everybody is on a level playing field; once you have done that then you need some form of democratic governance.
Everyone basically ends up designing the EU when they do this.
https://archive.is/Fc4S4
One web needs ground based gateways, which isn't really an option in warzones. These gateways will be immediately targeted. The only option is to used space based lasers for relay. Of which, spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.
Love or hate Elon, he's been able to turn himself into a very powerful figure on the world stage through technology alone. If you think him having complete control over Starlink is a national security risk, he's just getting started.
Unfortunately with European employement laws, I don't see them being able to compete. If you tried, you’d face fines, lawsuits, and maybe even criminal penalties for making your employees work the 80+ hour weeks that Elon requires from all of his companies.
Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
I've never understood the fetishization of long working hours. If there is a job where you can meaningfully work 80+ hours a week, the same (and often better) results can be achieved with more employees working fewer hours. If the work can't be split like that, it's probably demanding enough that you can't sustain more than 20-30 productive hours a week in the long term.
It's possible to mix reasonable hours of demanding work with additional hours of meetings, routine work, and procrastination. Maybe it's cheaper for the employer than managing the work better and hiring additional people for the routine parts. Maybe there are some social and organizational benefits to the employer when the employees have no life outside work. But long hours like that don't lead to superior outputs.
then why does spacex have superior outputs?
It made choices that turned out to be good in retrospect. And it's young enough that it hasn't turned into a stagnant bureaucracy yet.
Technology is not magic. If you can do something, others can do it as well, if they want. Established organizations often fail at that, because they don't want to be successful. They might want to be successful in principle, but in practice, the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization.
in 2001, Eutelsat transitioned into a private company, Eutelsat S.A., and later became Eutelsat Communications S.A., headquartered in Paris, France. In 2023, Eutelsat merged with OneWeb, a company founded in 2012, to form the Eutelsat Group.
Essentially, just as old as SpaceX.
So, how does one ensure a company continues to make good decisions? Have a very flat structure, and have alot of smart people work insanely long hours. If you hire twice as much people to match the 80 hour weeks, you no longer have a flat structure and >> "the personal interests of the people in charge override the interests of the organization."
You are right, technology is not magic, you've just got to want it more than anyone else. SpaceX wants it, Europe would rather have their maximum of 48 hours a week. Which is actually halarious, i don't think i've worked under 48 hours a week in my entire adult life. 50 is usually expected, 60 if you want good performance reviews and 70 if you want a promotion.
And before 2001, Eutelsat was an intergovernmental organization. You can't get rid of legacy baggage just by rebranding yourself. You need to get rid of existing stakeholders, directors, and managers. And to discard the existing organizational structures and organizational culture.
It's not possible to keep making good decisions indefinitely. Every organization eventually regresses towards mediocrity. Maybe incentives ruin things, maybe administrators learn how to game the system, or maybe the environment changes and the way the organization operates is no longer adequate.
I don't really follow what you are arguing here. You starting with long hours is the same as hiring two times the amount of people, then you say that the european companies are all to old to innovate? There are plenty of european startups in the space race, they just can't compete... because europeans have a distain for "Fetishizing long work hours"
Those are two mostly unrelated discussions.
If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
All organizations eventually stagnate, because humans have their own goals instead of being mindless cogs in the machine. SpaceX is still young enough that it may not be showing clear signs of stagnation, but it's hard to see that from the outside. Google is a few years older and clearly suffering from conflicting interests.
>If you do demanding work, a full working week is 20-30 hours. Even 40 hours is too much and cannot be sustained in the long term. You can do more in the short term, but you'll eventually burn yourself out. Longer hours are only possible with routine and/or fake work that doesn't really make you more productive.
This line shows me that we will never agree. If i showed this to my boss he would laugh... and so would my entire team.
Silicon Valley runs on 80-hour weeks, sleepless nights, and a culture that glorifies obsession. It's a system that burns hot — and burns people out. Many of the engineers and founders who fuel these breakthroughs walk away in their 30s and 40s, exhausted but occasionally leaving billion-dollar companies in their wake.
"Superior outputs" seems to have stagnated at Elon companies: From Falcon 9 to Starship, and from Model Y to Cybertruck, for example.
Calling building the biggest rocket in the world and the largest sat company in the world, that both launches, manufactures and operates the most sats in the world, while being the only company that can deliver humans reliably into space and also has a private space flight business. Claiming that ist 'stagnet' is an absolutely absurd claim. Oh and that was the Falcon Heavy.
Starship is even bigger and more powerful and has the most advanced rocket engine ever designed.
Just because they haven't yet managed to create a fully reusable vehicle, doesn't mean its 'stagnet'. A fully reusable rocket is insanely hard to build. Lets alone all the new infrastructure required to do it. And the first stage has already proven re-usability. If all they were shooting for was a much bigger Falcon 9, they would already have it.
And maybe try to actually compare it to the competition. Ariane 6 for instant was financed in 2014. And had lots and lots of work done before it, the engine that is in the Ariane 6 second stage has been in development since the late 90s.
SpaceX only had the resources to seriously invest in Starship around 2020 and even then it was nowhere close to top priority.
I know its fashionable to shit on Musk, but common, at least have some perspective. They are by far the biggest most successful space company in the world by such a wide margin that its not even funny. The competition has not yet even replicated the Falcon 9. And Amazon is struggling to get even an inferior version of Starlink up. And Boeing can't get their human system to work at all.
What do you mean by superior output?
Tons to space.
Because the USA is a big economy where people speak only one language. Would Elon Musk be able to create same success if he started Starlink or SpaceX in Norway?
What about France? ArianeSpace was the SpaceX of the 80s (they had >50% market share of commercial satellite launches). There were plenty of other innovative European companies if you go back several decades. These days? Not so much..
no, because it's illegal to work more than 48 hours a week. Which is like... The minimum to not get fired in the states.
If you have more people willing to work longer hours... you win, thats it. It's pretty simple really.
People only deserve success if they were born in a trash can during the civil war in Sudan. That's such a fucking dumb logic.
Musk specifically went to Silicon Valley because that's where the opportunity were.
But he was only one of many who tried to make it big. Just because the US is a big country doesn't magically create rockets that can fly to space.
> then why does spacex have superior outputs?
Yes, being enabled by a billionaire with a dream made a huge difference. But that's not a guarantee, as there's been 3 such billionaires and only one SpaceX.Or... incredibly long work hours and all of that just falls into place? Have you ever read any books about spaceX? His "surges" are what made spacex great.
SpaceX was founded with him as a millionaire tho
Musk wasn't even close to being a billionaire when SpaceX was founded. He is a billionaire because about 10 years after SpaceX was founded Tesla and SpaceX at the same time took off.
And other people as rich as Musk tried their hand in the space industry.
> spaceX is the only entity on the planet with this technology.
Rocket Lab is in talks to purchase Mynaric, a German company which specializes in laser links.
https://spacenews.com/rocket-lab-to-expand-into-laser-commun...
IRIS2 is literally being shot up this year and will work with good ol' regular 5G, instead of relying on expensive specialized terminals like starlink. [0]
No need to bring anti-worker propaganda into this.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/technology/space/eutelsat-succeeds-w...
Starlink already has connections to phones operational and deploying more of that far, far faster then any of the competitors.
And IRIS2 as far as I know isn't a direct to cell technology.
> Europe craves work life balance, Elon craves technological power. He's convinced some smart people their life is the company. Europe just doesn't have that culture, and it's mandated by law that you can't have that culture.
The problem is cultural yes but they have plenty of low cost labor willing to work overtime and put in long hours. It's called Eastern Europe. The bigger problem is an overly bureaucratic Brussels and a lack of imagination among their leadership. Britain can probably do well in this area, maybe the French too if they get their head out of their asses. The day they stop sending their top ML companies like Huggingface and Mistral to the US for funding is the day when the Fifth Republic finally spreads realizes their potential.
European oligarchs have different priorities. They invest in land, art and gold, that's how you preserve capital over generations. That's why top european companies end up taking money from venture capital in the US.
Global adoption of Starlink sure seems like it will be another likely casualty of the current Elon Musk political era. Why do any of this?
Everything musk owns is being affected.
1.) He needs them government contracts. And by needs I mean "really really needs".
2.) He believes in far right and government is far right. He is at home in this goverment.
3.) Attention and power. He got both now to unprecedented degree.
I hope they offer this in the US (it wouldn’t cost them any extra satellites). I’m looking for a starlink alternative. Ideally they could terminate my connection over there and I’d get gdpr protection too.
There is already a Canadian company, Telesat, that’s been doing comms since 1969.
Unfortunately, like most things from Canada, there was never enough market for it to catch on. Maybe that will change now the US has unlocked the demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telesat
Why? Because Elon like many people is extremely smart on narrow fields, he is not generally smart (he can’t fight for example, which is a form of intelligence. He also struggles with being honest, demonstrating potentially low EQ).
That’s not to say he’s dumb - it’s just that there is no one (!) who is generally smart - there is no generally applicable intelligence, experience always matters, and you always learn by doing.
It’s an illusion of the high IQ crowd that high IQ will means you will always succeed.
He is also always taking high risk bets. The X/politics/Trump bet paid off, in a way, but it also has its blowback.
edit also having said all this, it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.
He’s surrounded himself with idiot sycophants. It’s a well-known failure mode of the rich and powerful that he should have seen coming ten years away.
> ...it’s extremely unlikely that Europe will be successful at this. The future is US-China dominated.
I think the events of the last few weeks have been a wake-up call to many people around the globe who now see the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
I suspect there's a lot of really smart people who were previously happily living/working in the US who are now looking to emigrate to other lands, Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative. Could also rope in the Chinese to help as they also aren't too happy with the current state of affairs.
Britain tried voting themselves out from under the influence of a politician in Brussels that nobody in Britain voted for, but found that removing that influence was a lot easier said then done.
Sure I’m just saying Europe is not a place. Europe is not a giant coordinated economy. I’m “European” and I know how hard coordination problems are in the continent, since I’ve lived through its mismanagement my entire adult life.
> or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
Are you talking about the European Commission, which we didn’t vote for?
Your head of government appointed a member of that commission, though. For better or worse, it's similar to that same head of government being appointed by the people you actually voted for in a parliamentary system (but two steps removed).
> the value of not having their entire economy (or telecommunications &etc) be vulnerable to the whims of one person, be that the richest person in the world or a president nobody in Europe voted for.
.
> Could also rope in the Chinese to help
This is pretty funny. That's just switching who you rely on.
> Europe could easily allow them to go over there and practice their skills on a Europe First initiative
In Europe we prefer unskilled labour from third world countries so that they can do uber eats for cheap
He had little choice but to defect to Trump's side. If Harris had won, the damage due to supporting Trump would have been finite and likely fixable. However, a Trump victory would wreck essentially all of his companies if he'd gone all-in for Harris. They have massive dependencies on Federal government support.
No way to hand-wave the Nazi salutes away with game theory, though. Those were just stupid. Safe to say that nobody including Trump expected him to go that far.
Stay out and distance yourself from either camp? You're absolving the agency of the richest person in the world. And I get that might hard when one has got a crippling social media addiction and can't help but run their mouth. But again, let's not absolve the agency of the richest person in the world.
Traditionally that's what most public-facing CEOs and other business leaders have done, keeping their politics to themselves in order to avoid needlessly alienating customers and to maintain business continuity as administrations come and go.
That won't work with Trump. Not if you built your businesses on sectors that he is targeting, ranging from EVs to space exploration and research. Musk had to pick a side. Neutrality was never an option.
Few if any of us, regardless of wealth, have any real "agency" with Trump in office. There's nothing he can't fuck up and no one he can't fuck over. This is not an attempt at justification or absolution, just a simple statement of fact.
It would probably have worked just fine if the richest/biggest CEOs didn't jump to be first in line to appease Trump?
Again: you guys are missing my point. Whether you like it or not, or agree or not, they had no choice. Being rich as hell only leaves them that much more vulnerable to Trump.
If your business relies on the USPS as much as Amazon's still does, you want to have a seat at the table when the administration decides how they're going to kneecap the USPS. Same with tariffs, when half of the crap they sell comes straight outta Shenzhen. See also NASA and Musk. Being locked out of the rooms where these decisions get made is potentially fatal for them.
Your whole argument rests on excluding the middle, which could have been tepid support instead of appearing on stage to throw Nazi salutes, giving out money to voters signing fake Orwellian pledges about "supporting" the Constitution, and threatening to primary non-maggot congressional candidates. You've essentially set up a Roko's Basilisk, based around one small hateful man rather than superintelligence.
And I think I addressed the salutes (and implicitly his other actions) as being completely irrational and inexplicable. Musk does that sort of thing a lot.
If you're under the impression I think any of this is a good thing, that would be grossly incorrect.
Jeff Bezos seems to have made a few minor genuflections in Trump's direction and is otherwise unaffected (except for the wreckage Trump's tariffs are likely inflicting on Amazon.) No, Musk's decision was a choice. And now he's stuck with that choice. There is almost certainly no way that things "just go back to normal" with a future Democratic administration.
Torpedoing the Washington Post wasn't what I'd call a "minor genuflection," but whatever.
It would be interesting to hear this refuted rather than simply downvoted, by the way. What are some alternative explanations?
What do you mean? He’s obviously got a point? Even Steve Bannon thinks so. He says Elon was just ahead of the curve.
How much of Elon’s conversion was genuine vs mercenary is impossible to know, but it’s likely.
Launch statistics for 2024, for reference:
https://rocketlaunch.org/rocket-launch-recap/2024
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Usual American propaganda about Europe.
The truth is the normative push has been working very well. The EU is a very successful market. The poorer parts are getting richer far faster as soon as they join and the whole union is peaceful, something which was thought impossible sixty years ago.
The only people who would like the EU to disband are its ennemies and I include the US amongst them.
my point exactly.
europe is way too focused on empowering their losers instead of their winners.
It's so funny when anyone in the US makes fun of the EU because we're literally the EU with an even stronger overbearing central government, more infighting, and you're not allowed to leave.
This exactly, one of the more bizarre brain worms around tech community is people that fetishize US and want EU to be more like that... and then complain about centralisation and standardization that makes US so strong.
I honestly would not be surprised if we ended up returning to a more fragmented EU, it's becoming quite a mess.
Personally, I absolutely love if we could have something looser, like a "Common European Area": freedom to travel, freedom to study, freedom to live, freedom to work. That's it. No EC/EP or anything like that.
This is what the orange guy dreams about as well. That he can strike individual "deals" with each small country so he can win on size like a sumo wrestler against a featherweight wrestler.
It is pretty obvious that the common foreign policy is more important than ever. Sadly it is too late to include Canada, South Korea, Australia and Japan into that umbrella, at least this time around.
And people here in Sweden are talking about that next we will need to give up our currency and use the Euro since that is what T will weaponize next, going after the smaller currencies.
Why would you want to destroy your economy and quality of life like that?
This was something that came up during Brexit of course but it seems difficult when you start getting into the details.
The idea is that (completely reasonably) if you have a “single market” as you describe, you need harmonised regulation so everybody is on a level playing field; once you have done that then you need some form of democratic governance.
Everyone basically ends up designing the EU when they do this.
>The idea is that (completely reasonably) if you have a “single market” as you describe
I didn't really describe this though. Had I mentioned currencies or trade agreements you might have more of a point.
It's more like automatic work permits for Europeans within Europe, unlimited stays, ease of access to renting + purchasing housing.
If you set starlink to collide with one another , you get a nice kessler shield that prevents all icbm firing
Interesting concept for sci-fi but not realistic.
It's not Europe, it's some bureaucrats at Bruxelles that have never standed for election.
Totally fine. Go back to paying long distance charges for dialup and munitions hitting the COs. It’s no problem at all.